my tears ricochet

Chapter Seventy

"You can ask, but I promised I wouldn't say anything," Beth informed Daryl, picking at the strings of her bracelet around her wrist. "So, don't make me go back on that."

Daryl had never spent much time with kids before the fall. Younger ones, sure. They popped up on occasion with the men he knew. But families always split and he saw them grow up through photographs kept on fridges, the names tattooed to skin like a legacy.

He hadn't realized what it was like to be stonewalled by a pair of teenaged girls. Ivy and Beth ran circles around everyone, nearly oblivious to the circles Daryl, Glenn, and Maggie were trying to run around them to keep them contained. "I gotta know what's happening."

His mind was full of horrible scenarios, shadows of what it had been like in the aftermath of Woodbury. Ron was bigger than his daughter. Daryl had seen the boy with a pack of others, noted the way his hand caught the wrist of another girl in passing.

"Ivy picked me. And I picked her," Beth told him seriously, tilting her head slightly. The low light of the room made her look older; a girl plucked from a world of safety and thrown into a place where she had to fight her way out. "I can't tell you anything."

Beth had watched her father die badly. And then her entire world had been shattered, a pair of girl sprinting into the unknown. Whatever softness she had, it was matched by an undeniable streak of stubbornness.

"Then I guess Ron is gonna die," he informed her, sharp despite himself. "If you can't give me one good reason to keep him breathing."

Her blank expression faltered and he saw the nervous shift of her hands, mouth pressing into a firm line before breaking. "Ivy doesn't want you to know because you'll do something like that," Beth said, unintentionally giving Daryl a shred of raw truth. Something was happening that would set him off and they both knew it. "That's why we're being careful. I'm watching out for her."

"That so?"

"If it looks bad, I'll tell you."

"I bet."

"We keep each other safe," Beth's voice was as sharp as a knife. "I'm watching out. But right now, it's important to her that no one else knows."

The secrecy was a noose around his throat. Daryl wanted to throttle Abraham for teaching the girls how to write coded messages to each other, himself for pushing ASL so they could exchange clever little conversations without anyone knowing what was being said.

And he wanted to throttle Ivy for deciding to let Beth go free in Terminus and to fight until she was on the ground, giving the girl enough time to run as far as she could. They had picked each other; a strange pair of sisters forged out of danger and wariness, bleeding comfortably without ever knowing the damage. Beth wasn't going to betray her promise now.

"Stay on the couch tonight. No more running around for a bit," he said, trying to mask the irritation in his voice.

"It'll be okay, you know? I thought it wouldn't be safe again but we all found each other. We're safe because we're together. Alexandria... it's just a place. And places don't last forever," Beth said quietly. "But I remember everyone and how we got here."

The house had been falling apart, Daryl remembered, when he found Ivy. The metal roof peeled up like teeth, rusted and torn. A door hung badly from exhausted hinges. Whatever home it once was, it had died. And Daryl had walked away with a daughter, old life discarded in favour of pulling himself in the direction of a new horizon.

"Just sleep, Greene."

.

The one true perk of having a kid with hearing loss was that Daryl never had to worry about an aggressive knocking waking her up. It didn't disturb the girl on the couch either, Beth happily buried beneath a few layers of blankets and unmoving in the early hour.